Narrating the Revolutionary Self in German Post‐terrorist Life‐writing

Over the last two decades, a number of former members of the ‘Rote Armee Fraktion’ and ‘Bewegung 2. Juni’ have published accounts of their past. This article turns to four examples from that corpus of German post‐terrorist life‐writing, focusing on gendered differences in the narrative (re)construction of the revolutionary self. Through a close reading of texts by two former women terrorists, Margrit Schiller (1999) and Inge Viett (1996), and those by two former male terrorists, Karl‐Heinz Dellwo (2007) and Till Meyer (1996), I explore the representation of historical agency, gendered subjectivity, and of the trajectory of becoming a revolutionary. In a context in which, as has been argued, there is very little discursive space to imagine the revolutionary woman, certainly at the time these women were operating, I address the degree to which Viett and Schiller can be seen to articulate a distinctly female ‘Kämpferin’ identity and in how far that might be seen as making a feminist intervention

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · German · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Representation (politics · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Terrorism · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · German legal, social, and political studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Populism, Right-Wing Movements